As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande\'s Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever.
After half a century of photography, Smithers\' superlative collection of nine thousand images ended up at the University of Texas at Austin, an.
For decades thereafter he returned to Texas\' last great frontier-the great bend of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border-chronicling the region and its people in words and photographs.
As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande\'s Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever